Criticism; English essays; English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Poetry
Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,
consider it,--without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a
thoroughly immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know a
thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing,
sympathize with it: that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he have
not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the
courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he
know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.
Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the
pusillanimous for ever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is
mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.--But does
not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where
the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the
world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it
should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine
_morality_, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the
geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his
own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so
forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other
suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say
of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same
dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine
life!--These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts
with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations,
modifications they require, your own candour will supply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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